Motivational Quotes

Humor

The comic and the tragic lie inseparably close, like light and shadow.

- Socrates

Best Quotes about Humor

1.

The role of a comedian is to make the audience laugh, at a minimum of once every fifteen seconds.

Bruce, Lenny

2.

A joke was not a single-use item but something you brought out again and again until it fell apart in your hand like a cheap umbrella.

David Nicholls

3.

A jest often decides matters of importance more effectual and happily than seriousness.

Horace

4.

The right honorable gentlemen is indebted to his memory for his jokes and his imagination for his facts.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

5.

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

6.

Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.

Twain, Mark

7.

Comedy is the last refuge of the nonconformist mind.

Seldes, Gilbert

8.

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

9.

Humor is an affirmation of dignity, a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him.

Gary, Roman

10.

A sense of humor is part of the art of leadership, of getting along with people, of getting things done.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

11.

Good humor isn't a trait of character, it is an art which requires practice.

Seabury, David

12.

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

Swift, Jonathan

13.

A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs-jolted by every pebble in the road.

Beecher, Henry Ward

14.

There is always some frivolity in excellent minds; they have wings to rise, but also stray.

Joubert, Joseph

15.

Humor is a rubber sword - it allows you to make a point without drawing blood.

Mary Hirsch

16.

Comedy may be big business but it isn't pretty.

Martin, Steve

17.

Isn't it sad how some people can't be funny, so they have to settle for being obnoxious?

18.

Any man who has had the job I've had and didn't have a sense of humor wouldn't still be here.

Truman, Harry S

19.

Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die.

Mel Brooks

20.

There is this benefit in brag, that the speaker is unconsciously expressing his own ideal. Humor him by all means; draw it all out, and hold him to it.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

21.

Humor is by far the most significant activity of the human brain.

Edward De Bono

22.

I could not tread these perilous paths in safety, if I did not keep a saving sense of humor.

Nelson, Lord

23.

There are things of deadly earnest that can only be mentioned under the cover of a joke.

Procter, J. J.

24.

The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it.

Eco, Umberto

25.

Never say a humorous thing to a man who does not possess humor. He will always use it in evidence against you.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

26.

The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.

Horace Walpole

27.

If you can make a woman laugh you can do anything with her.

Williamson, Nicol

28.

It is well known that Beauty does not look with a good grace on the timid advances of Humor.

Maugham, W. Somerset

29.

I used to think that everything was just being funny but now I don't know. I mean, how can you tell?

Warhol, Andy

30.

Humor is always based on a modicum of truth. Have you ever heard a joke about a father-in-law.

Clark, Dick

31.

A brilliant epigram is a solemn platitude gone to a masquerade ball.

Strachey, Lionel

32.

There's nothing like a gleam of humor to reassure you that a fellow human being is ticking inside a strange face.

Eva Hoffman

33.

Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.

E. B. White

34.

Men will confess to treason, murder, arson, false teeth, or a wig. How many of them will own up to a lack of humor?

Colby, Frank Moore

35.

Any discussion of the problems of being funny in America will not make sense unless we substitute the word wit for humor. Humor inspires sympathetic good-natured laughter and is favored by the healing-power gang. Wit goes for the jugular, not the jocular, and it's the opposite of football; instead of building character, it tears it down.

King, Florence

36.

An inexhaustible good nature is one of the most precious gifts of heaven, spreading itself like oil over the troubled sea of thought, and keeping the mind smooth and equable in the roughest weather.

Irving, Washington

37.

They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.

Hemingway, Ernest

38.

Where ever you find humor, you find pathos close by it side.

Whipple, Edwin P.

39.

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

Pico Iyer

40.

As a person is so must you humor them.

Terence

41.

Where humor is concerned there are no standards - no one can say what is good or bad, although you can be sure that everyone will.

John Kenneth Galbraith

42.

Good taste and humor are a contradiction in terms, like a chaste whore.

Muggeridge, Malcolm

43.

A caricature is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth.

Conrad, Joseph

44.

All my humor is based upon destruction and despair. If the whole world were tranquil, without disease and violence, I'd be standing on the breadline right in back of J. Edgar Hoover.

Bruce, Lenny

45.

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.

Katz, Ellie

46.

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh

Reiner, Carl

47.

I have a fine sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humor.

Albee, Edward

48.

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.